Outstanding unsolved product bugs are a major risk to computing companies, including computer networking companies, computer hardware companies, computer software companies, and any other type of company tasked with creating and maintaining computer devices that need to operate properly over time. For example, a large computer networking company may experience nearly two million technical assistance cases per year, and engineers may spend thousands of hours attempting to reproduce customer problems, often without success.
In general, spending thousands of man-hours on manually narrowing down the root cause of catastrophic bugs, very often with no success, is inefficient and impractical, and often fruitless. In addition, many severe problems can escape quality assurance testing, learning about them only when they affect customers in the field. Still further, being unable to reproduce rare problems (such as “one-time” crashes) can still be detrimental since those problems can continue to occur frequently across many different customer networks.
Though existing problem detection and crash decoding systems currently have the ability to detect that a device issue has occurred, such systems are unable to determine the root cause for the problem, and therefore are also unable to provide any solution to the problem. That is, without being able to pinpoint the reason behind the issues, current techniques cannot consistently and reliably reproduce the issues. Without knowing why device issues happen, it is difficult to determine a proper solution for the issues.